Growing Peril to U.S. Sovereignty

Friday - February 26, 1999 at 9:20 pm

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by Patrick J. Buchanan – February 26, 1999

Up at the United Nations, the carpenters of the New World Order are busy constructing the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal. Modeled on the Nuremberg court that convicted the Nazis, the new tribunal claims jurisdiction over all nations, including the United States.

Last July, America rejected the court, fearing U.S. soldiers could be prosecuted. Yet, American diplomats are beavering away alongside U.N. bureaucrats who envision the tribunal as a world court that shall sit above the claims of any and all nation-states.

The sovereignty issue is roaring back. This time, our elites may not write it off as the concern only of folks on the look-out for black helicopters, or sitting on rural hillsides soaking up the thunderous oratory at God-and-Country rallies. For even centrist scholars are now breaking the glass on the fire alarms.

“Why Sovereignty Matters” is the title of a paper written for the American Enterprise Institute by Jeremy Rabkin, a professor of government at Cornell, who sees global agreements as a growing and direct threat to American sovereignty.

“(W)hat makes a state sovereign,” Rabkin writes, “is that it need answer to no outside authority.” For us, “sovereignty means the primacy of our own Constitution. The people of the United States, by their own sovereign authority, have made the Constitution supreme over the government, and no outside agreement can challenge that supremacy.”

Yet, both NAFTA and Al Gore’s Kyoto treaty on global warming supersede our Constitution and imperil that sovereignty, putting America on the same fatal path being trod by Europe.

Writes Rabkin: “(T)he Common Market … has expanded in size and ambition to emerge as something like a federal superstate. … The European Union has undertaken … to remove tariff barriers … to standardize products and services, to ensure common protections for labor and the environment, and to reallocate wealth from richer to poorer regions. In total, such ‘integration’ is far more ambitious than the aggregate of policies undertaken by the federal government in the United States. … (T)he European Court of Justice claims and exercises the authority to invalidate statutory enactments of parliaments …

“No one seriously pretends,” he adds, “that the member states of the EU are still sovereign in the way they once were.”

With Tony Blair’s Britain, Europe last great holdout, preparing to surrender its currency and control of monetary policy to the new European central bank, the day of the nation-state in Europe is over.

Now, the United States, too, “has begun to participate in environmental agreements, human rights agreements, trade agreements, and agreements in other areas that do raise inescapable questions about American sovereignty.”

Under NAFTA, private companies can appeal U.S. import duties to panels dominated by Canadians and Mexicans, whose rulings are binding on U.S. courts. Globalists have discovered the loophole in the Constitution, Article 6, which puts foreign treaties on the same plane, and are driving their one-world agenda right through it.

The Kyoto Protocol, Rabkin writes, “assumes that actions of motorists in Kansas or homeowners in Minnesota can be related to ‘international’ concerns. … In ratifying that treaty, the Senate would seem to be ratifying in advance a whole series of future policies that may never return to the Senate for its consent.”

If Americans are not to lose their constitutional rights and the United States. its sovereignty to “global governance,” there is a need for the eternal vigilance that is the price of liberty, and more than that.

“Congress must come to grips with the threatened erosion of U.S. sovereignty in the very near future,” writes Rabkin. We need both “new protective legislation against international bureaucratic mandates,” and “a formal amendment to the Constitution to clarify and reinforce traditional limitations.”

America needs an amendment that declares that no treaty we enter into is above the Constitution, and that above the sovereignty of the nation stands the sovereignty of God alone. Here is an issue to rally Republicans, conservatives and populists, leaving out only those whose hidden agenda is Strobe Talbott’s World Government.

Jefferson wrote: “Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution.”